Lunch seminar with Tove Engvall
Tove Engvall is a senior lecturer in the subject of Archives and Information Science and affiliated with RCR and the KKI department at Mid Sweden University. The theme of her lunch seminar is climate, AI and risks.
Climate governance is fundamentally information-driven. International transparency frameworks impose extensive requirements on reporting on emissions, climate adaptation needs and climate finance. The result is a rapidly growing amount of data, where the central challenge is no longer to collect information, but to make it understandable, accessible and usable. In this context, more and more actors are exploring how artificial intelligence can be used to analyse data, identify patterns and support decision-making. At the same time, this raises new questions about risk.
Some risks are general and well-known from AI research, such as bias, hallucinations, lack of transparency, and high resource consumption. Other risks are specific to the climate area, which is already characterized by political conflicts, geopolitical tensions, power asymmetries, and the presence of disinformation. When AI is introduced in this context, questions arise about how the technology affects trust, legitimacy, and responsibility – and whether it can reinforce or bridge conflicts.
At the same time, AI is increasingly being used to manage climate risks, for example through warning systems, risk analyses and support for preparedness work. AI is thus not only a potential source of risk, but also part of society's strategies for addressing climate-related risks.
This raises a fundamental question: How can we understand and manage the interplay between climate, AI and risk at a time when digital technology is becoming increasingly central to both governance and crisis management?